love gone wild ATC swap: Sabine Busch, Germany

Sabine Busch from Germany has already completed her ATCs for our 'love gone wild swap' due 2/15 and posted them on her blog! She will be mailing them tomorrow, how exciting for me. You can take a look at her 4 ATCs here:  http://stempeltanz.blogspot.com/2010/01/love-gone-wild.html

Beautiful work; thanks so much, Sabine!

4 for 4 ATC swap

Here is an update for you - the 'love gone wild' ATC swap I recently announced is half-full with participants! It is not due in my hands until February 15th, so you still have time to think about it if you are considering joining. This is an easy 4 ATCs for 4 in return and the details are in this previous post. Sign ups are right here on this blog, with the PayPal 'pay now' button to your left. I have had a number of wonderful artists register from all over the USA: California, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Maine, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, Alabama . . .as well as participants from Germany, The Netherlands, and Australia, wow . . . I am looking forward to an awesome swap! I hope you'll join us and have a chance to win some prizes, or just enjoy the art from this swap as it comes in and gets posted on this blog. I will be re-united with my scanner in a couple of weeks when we move into a house/meet the moving van, yay! That will make it easy & fun to share the art from this swap. I will let you know with another post if the sign-ups near the limit of participants! lenna young andrews - January 6th, 2010

update on the ATC swap

Wow, I have had 12 sign-ups for the Love Gone Wild - 4 for 4 - ATC swap already, in one day. Thank you! I will take about 40 participants, IF that many are interested . . . . so as of this writing know that there are 28 spots open. I will keep tabs on the number of sign ups on the sidebar of the blog so you can check to see if there's room, if you are thinking it over! It is sure to be a fantastic swap with the participants that have registered already. The swap details are in the post below this one, just scroll down.
There has been one really lovely update to the swap since I have announced it. There are now THREE, yes three Prizes for this swap instead of two and gifts for everyone! Vintage Image Madness has volunteered to sponsor the swap by donating small packets of their wonderful images for each player, PLUS giving a free monthly subscription for one month (usually $25) to the Vintage Image Madness website for unlimited downloads. Anyone who completes the swap will have a chance to win (via a random drawing) a 4" x 4" collage created by Lenna -  and another random drawing will be held for the unlimited download subscription. Additionally, one participant will be chosen for the most creative ATC artwork and this person will be awarded free participation in the next creative swap! ALL participants will receive a small gift. Sounds good to me! Hope you'll join us too - all details are below, sign up button to the left! 

Love gone wild ~ 4 for 4 ATC swap!

Happy New Year!

 * *  Love gone wild! Anyone who completes this 4 for 4 ATC swap will have a chance to win (via a random drawing) this 4" x 4" collage created by Lenna! * *

creative swaps 2010 . . . swap #1 – an Artist Trading Card Swap 

• What: a 4 for 4 ATC Swap ~ fabric OR paper OR both. Create 4 ATCs (all the same or all different) and receive 4 different ATCs in return.
• Theme: Love Gone Wild! Think passion, romance, hot colors, wild art techniques, romance novels, kissing, love, valentines, vintage or modern love, a little bit on the wild side.
• Due IN my Mailbox no later than Monday, February 15th, 2010. I reserve the right to return any late swaps received after 2/15/10 back to the sender.
• TWO sets of 4 is the maximum you are allowed to submit for this swap and you must register for each set that you submit ($5.00 per set). Simply register on the creative swaps blog twice and I will know you are sending in 2 sets.

To register for this swap is easy! Use the ‘pay now’ PayPal button in the left hand side bar on the creative swaps blog. The $5.00 fee to register for this swap is your non-refundable payment for postage, handling and an information packet pertaining to the swap. PayPal is a free on-line bank service - find out more here. The $5.00 registration fee covers return mailing of one set of 4 ATCs both within the USA, and outside of the U.S.A.
I will confirm your registration via email with additional swap information including a nine page pdf file filled with Artist Trading Card ideas, links and possible images to use as well as the mailing address where you need to send your swaps to. If the email you have listed with PayPal is not the correct one for me to correspond with, please notify me of the correct email. If you have sent a PayPal registration and have not received confirmation from me within 48 hours please Email me directly.

The perks! There are now THREE Prizes for this swap and gifts for everyone! 
Vintage Image Madness has volunteered to sponsor the swap by donating small packets of their wonderful images for each player, PLUS giving a free monthly subscription for one month  (usually $25) to the Vintage Image Madness website for unlimited downloads.  Anyone who completes the swap will have a chance to win (via a random drawing) a 4" x 4" collage created by Lenna - shown above, and another random drawing will be held for the unlimited download subscription. Additionally, one participant will be chosen for the most creative ATC artwork and this person will be awarded free participation in the next creative swap! ALL participants will receive a small gift.
• All ATCs must be 2.5” x 3.5” in size (6.4 cm x 8.9 cm)
• your design can be either landscape or portrait orientation
• your ATCs can be all fabric, all paper, or some of both
• your ATCs can be ALL the SAME design - ALL different - or a mix

- hope you can join us! Swap is limited to 40 participants. :  ^ )  lenna young andrews - Dec. 31st, 2009

new swap coming soon!

I have been working out the details for a new creative swap for 2010 and I will be back with the details later tonight or tomorrow! I will let you know that it is an ATC swap - check out the completed poll to your left on the blog! Thanks for letting me know what you are interested in doing; I will be planning a 4x4 swap next : ) lenna

vote for art swap ideas!

The poll is up and running on the creative swaps blog! Thanks to all of you who have voted already on your favorite art exchange ideas. As of this writing it looks like ATCs and 4x4 collages are in the lead, but i will leave the poll up until the end of the year. I am excited about hosting a swap again in 2010! It has been quite a while and I have definitely missed hosting. I hope you will join me early next year and also let me know what you are most interested in participating in. Thanks!

We are settling in to our rental here in Florida, looking at other options for the future and enjoying my oldest son and his significant other visiting us this week. My mom's 75th birthday is tomorrow and my sister will be down visiting too!! : ) lenna young andrews, December 9th, 2009

we have moved!

Yes, we have moved to beautiful Palma Sola, Bradenton, Florida. While I am not ready to announce an art swap yet, I would love to start thinking about it . . . so I have created a poll with some swap ideas in the left-hand column of this blog. Please go there and vote! I will leave the poll up until the end of the year so you'll have about 3 weeks to let me know your preferences. You can also email me and give me any other ideas for art swaps you participated in that you enjoyed. Thanks!! lenna young andrews - December 8th, 2009.

saying hello

I feel badly there has been no art or swaps here for quite some time now. We are still working on selling our home and it is hard in this market when you do not have a cookie-cutter house! But we are persevering, have dropped the price, have an Open House this Sunday, October 25th, from 12-2pm and we have been having showings as well. So there is hope. I so want to join my mom and dad in Florida. My dad recently had a PET scan to see how his liver cancer is doing and his Dr just told him, "Good news on PET/CT. Significantly improved. The damn stuff is working." - he is talking about xelota - the chemo my dad is doing. Dad has also done radiation.

Anyway, that is where i am, if any of you are still out there!! If you hang onto this link or email notification, one day i will announce a new swap! But not now : )) just checking in. Hope you are all well.

Following up on the Shades of Spring Quiltie Swap

Rose Momsen, one of my swap participants sent me the following photos & descriptions:

"Front cover: image is paper appliqued from Melissa Sweet's Counting Birds Wall Cards by eeBoo Toys. I had dreams of making this image in fabric for my pages, so was happy to use it for the cover. It seems to embody the quiltie theme really well."

Yes! I received a lovely email from Rose Momsen in Point Roberts, Washington the other day. She had some photos to share with me, and she told me she had made a book out of her Robin's Egg Blue and Brown ~ Shades of Spring Quilties from our swap, that she loves. Rose said, "I thought the other quiltie artists would enjoy seeing what I did with their work."

Wow! I asked if she would mind writing a few sentences to share with us about her photos, and she did. Thank you so much, Rose! More on how she completed this project below all the photos.

" Top view of the fatbook. Calgary artist Anne St. Louis' page with ribbon tags can be seen reaching up."

"View of fatbook sitting open. It's a bit floppy to display like this, but you can see a bit of my spring landscape page this way."

"South Dakotan Sue Lee's page on the left says, "Spring is nature's way of saying, 'Let's party!'" And Martha Franklin, from Virginia did the dot ribbon framed, heart button leaved page on the right."

"The back of Anne's page on the left, and my Homage to Nancy Crow's Constructions Series on the right. That's some of the same Lonni Rossi brown/black print that I used for the outside spine on the cover."

"Beverley Teichrob from Victoria, BC did the page on the left (her front was a wonderful felt nest in a tree), and Sara Ellen Davis from Tennessee did the page on the right, with a vintage pin of a turquoise owl in the upper left corner."

"This is the inside of the front cover, with my business card and Lenna's card glued in place. You can see the over cast whip stitch clearly, where the signature of the quiltie pages is attached to the cover over the seam allowance. I used a blue thread to sew the quiltie pages together, and a brown thread to sew them to the covers, keeping with the same color theme. The page on the right is by Kate North, who lives outside London, England. Her page seemed to be a great introduction to the Spring theme of the swap, so I chose it for the first page.

Thanks again to everyone who participated! My book has pages from Kate North, Beverley Teichrob, Saraellen Davis, Lisa Mallette (Florida), Joellyn Quinn (Wisconsin), Anne St. Louis, Sue Lee, Martha Franklin, myself, and Dawn Sellers (Oregon)."

"It was great fun to participate in my first "Lenna Swap", the Robin's Egg Blue and Brown Spring Quilties from 2008. I knew I wanted to make a fabric fatbook out of mine, so I sent in two different sets of little quilts, kept one each of my pages, and swapped with the friend who got me to join, too, so I wound up with 12 pages for my book. I played with the page order for a long time, and then sewed the twelve pages together into a signature with a line of chain stitching across them in three places: top, middle, and bottom. I made a cover "envelope style" by piecing handdyed blue fabrics backed with interfacing, and found a great brown/black Lonni Rossi print for the book's spine. I slipped heavyweight coverstock paper into the front and back before assembling the cover, to give the book some body.

The cover's seam allowances are hidden inside the spine opening by hand whip stitching the signature over them, securing the pages to the book. There's a slit for a pocket in the inside back cover where I put copies of the emails and the directions for the swap. Here are pictures and comments. Thanks everyone who participated! Rose Momsen, Point Roberts, WA - geonrose@pointroberts.net"

~ Now, if anyone one else out there has also completed projects, or does finish projects using art from our previous swaps that you would like to share here, please email me. It would be fun to share what you have done with the rest of the viewers, especially as creative swaps are on hiatus now, and this blog is otherwise quiet. Thanks!

Hello! Remember the Alice in Wonderland ATC swap? (Alpha Stamps)

I received a lovely follow-up email from Donna Butcher in California today! She was one of the participants in our Alice in Wonderland ATC swap. Donna wrote, and I quote with her permission . . .
"I so appreciate your sharing all your artwork and all the time you have given to swaps! I am working on some UFO's and the one that is finished and I finally took some photos of to share is the collage I did from the Alice ATC Swap. I don't think the photo does it justice. I did it on a stretched canvas (16x20). I first used crackle paste on it and then painted and inked it to get the color and shadows I wanted. The big tree is paper with ribbon leaves. Then I added the ATC's and some other Alice images on transparencies. The little areas are filled in with various little gems like, a watch with workings, crowns, keys, a door knocker (which works), butterflies (that are shrink plastic), bugs, there are mushrooms (polymer clay) at the bottom edge among the dirt (distress Stickles and spheres) and leaves (cut paper). The outer edge is dark brown with checked ribbon around it. I cannot seem to get a picture that really does it justice. I love looking at it on the wall near my upstairs art desk. Just wanted to share with you a piece of art inspired by a swap of yours - thank you!"

Wow! Thank you, Donna! So great to hear from you and see this marvelous finished piece from one of our swaps. So creative! I love the tree that you've made and how you placed the Cheshire Cat ATC up on the limbs of the tree. Below are a couple of close-ups so you can see Donna's collage better -click on them for more detail. Does anyone recognize their own ATC in Donna's collage? What do you think?This swap wrapped up in February, 2009. I love seeing what Donna did with her returns!

On a personal note, since I have not been in touch for a while -- things are fine here with Steven & I in Connecticut. Our home has been on the market for just about 5 weeks now and we are getting a lot of interest, we've had a couple of Open Houses with good attendance and quite a number of showings. We are just waiting for an offer : ) and we simply need the right person to come along, so I am trying my best to be patient!! My dad has finished his radiation treatment on both lobes of his liver and he is still in remission. He has a gal bladder procedure to go through and is going through stress tests now to see if the time is right. I am looking at a few possibilities as far as homes near my parents, but we are not falling in love with anything until our home here in CT sells! Things are definitely quieter with no swaps to run or classes to teach, but I am keeping busy with moving preparations (mostly boring cleaning out!) and I have been creating a bit of art lately, which has been fun & kept my spirits up. I cannot promise anything as far as creative swaps is concerned because everything is up in the air too much, but know without a doubt that I miss you all!

. . . from lenna

Even though I am not currently hosting a swap, I am trying to feature your 12x12 quilts from our most recent swap on the home page in a rotating fashion.
I am still posting a little bit over on my creativelenna blog, in-between house showing appointments. I have some small works of art I have been able to do that I will share as soon as time allows . . . so, for now, I will see you over there instead!

Canceling the Canvas Swap

I'm so sorry to write tonight and let you know that I am canceling the last swap I had scheduled -- The 3 for 3 collage on canvas swap due in June. I had 14 participants register already and I will be refunding their registration payment via PayPal later tonight, as soon as I send this message to the blog! One participant has already sent in her canvases, and I will be mailing those back to you tomorrow, Martha.

Again, I apologize, but there is just too much going on in my life personally with selling our home and all that entails. I need to focus my attention on the process of moving to be near my parents and feel I cannot give this canvas swap the attention it needs.

So! You will find the creative swaps blog quiet for quite a while. I have no idea when our home will sell and when I will get back to hosting and I cannot even think of it now, so please don't ask! I know many of you thoroughly enjoyed the swaps and will miss them dearly. I want to thank you again for being with me on this journey. I rarely hear complaints, usually I hear the opposite, but . . . if you were ever unsatisfied with the swap and did not tell me, I want to thank you for remembering to take these exchanges as a chance to learn and grow, and be challenged to do your best work. Everyone has a different "level" and I have always tried my best to match you up with something you will appreciate, no matter what level you are. I feel the most important part of this is simply the challenge to be inspired and create; not what you receive. I have hosted art swaps for so long because I love to bring people together to create. I feel I have a gift to be able to do this - and I should use this gift when I can. Please find another outlet in the meantime - I can suggest ARTchix Studio for great challenges, swaps and free classes (some written by me!). I hope to see you again before too long. Thank you for your participation, support and wonderful art.

Most sincerely, Lenna